


I Think You Love

by scioscribe



Category: Justified
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Intoxication, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-24
Updated: 2013-05-24
Packaged: 2017-12-12 20:44:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/815865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-S4, Boyd's a little self-destructive, and Raylan wants to believe he's been right about everything all along.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Think You Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [norgbelulah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/norgbelulah/gifts).



> Thanks to Thornfield Girl for the beta-reading!
> 
> The prompt was "Boyd/Raylan - And I... I tried so hard to let you go/But some kind of Madness/Is swallowing me whole," and I hope it works.

Some people listened to audiobooks, but Raylan got fidgety, so since there wasn’t anything he could find on the radio that wasn’t Taylor Swift somehow playing as country, he killed time on the drive to Harlan rehearsing all the ways he could maybe tell Boyd to go fuck himself. He was already within county limits when it occurred to him that coming all that way to at least consider bailing Boyd out of jail put a mixed message to the speech at the very least, but what the hell, he was there anyway, and Boyd in a cell would be good for a few laughs, if nothing else. A distraction from worrying about the baby and how Winona had been thinking about ancestral-type names, like Gertrude, that he wouldn’t want to saddle a child with unless the world had gotten a hell of a lot kinder than since his playground days. He was only eighty percent sure or so that Winona was joking.

The whole situation made Boyd look appealing in comparison, so Raylan was feeling magnanimous about it all until they let him in the back and he actually saw Boyd.

He stepped closer and hooked his hand around one of the bars, scraping flecks of tan paint off underneath his fingernails, absently, like he just wanted to scratch something.

The deputy left them alone, waved off by the star on Raylan’s hip, which was just as well: he’d be content with getting paint on his hands only as long as there wasn’t anything better, and he wasn’t in the mood to be tempted. As soon as the door at the end of the hall clanked shut, Raylan said, “Can you stand up all right?”

“I’ve not been overly eager to try,” Boyd said, but he lurched up, one hand against the wall, and gave Raylan a better look at the bruises on his face. He walked over to the bars carefully, a non-bullshit-looking wince at half the steps, and Raylan, not wanting to, really, for some reason moved his hand so his thumb went inside the slightly open cuff of Boyd’s shirt, though they still didn’t really touch. “I’m pleased you saw fit to come.”

“Your mouth’s bleeding.”

Boyd’s tongue flicked out against the cut. “Off and on.”

“You do anything to merit it?”

“By whose standards?” Boyd tilted forwards and then his forehead was against the bars and Raylan could see the beads of sweat on it from the effort he was making just to hold himself up. He’d seen Boyd in worse shape, he supposed, after what his daddy had done to him—and done to his church—but that had been different, because it hadn’t had so much to do with him, the way this did, the way anything done by anyone with a badge did, if only because he’d taken down Drew Thompson and tried to lock Boyd himself up, a time or six.

“My standards,” he said, because he imagined Boyd would know them.

“No.” Boyd turned his head slightly. “I was a little drunk, is all. Ava.” It was a mark of how much he was hurting, Raylan thought, that he contented himself with so few words: _No_ and _Ava_ , as though Raylan would know the rest of it. Which he did. “Didn’t lay a hand—” His eyes flickered and Raylan grabbed his wrist and pushed him off the bars and back towards the cot.

“Go sit down. I’ll get it sorted out.”

Boyd sat painfully straight against the wall, like the cinderblocks were a substitute for his spine, and Raylan flicked paint off his hands, his mouth feeling tight.

He went and found the deputy again.

“That didn’t take long,” he said, and he was a skinny son of a bitch, like a pipe-cleaner Raylan wanted to twist into a loop. “You bailing him out?”

“I’m thinking maybe you’re gonna find he’s not accused of anything,” Raylan said. He looped his thumbs through his belt loops and made himself smile. “Seeing as how someone laid into him pretty hard, hard enough for a litigious man to take this piddly-shit county for all it’s worth, I’m thinking that you might find, you look hard enough, that, oh, shit, it turns out he wasn’t actually doing anything at all when you picked him up, besides being drunk and maybe an asshole. You want to make being an asshole something Harlan County puts you in jail for? ‘Cause I don’t think you have the cells for it.”

“You know who he is,” the deputy said. He seemed almost confused by what was going on, like Raylan was an optical illusion and if he blinked right, the whole situation would materialize into something more understandable. “You know the Crowders—”

“I know Boyd Crowder and I know Ava Crowder and I don’t think you want me to know you by name, do you? Even I can’t get away with shit like what you did to him, and I can guarantee you have no idea what shit I _do_ get away with.”

He had spent hours and even days since the sound of gunfire breaking through glass wondering when Nicky Augustine’s death would hit him, and now he supposed it finally had, though not how he would have liked. Someone better wouldn’t have processed it, in the end, with cold delight.

“You in his pocket or something?”

“Closest I ever came to being in Boyd Crowder’s pocket was when I shot him in the chest—bullet might have gone in through the shirt pocket, maybe. You understand everything now? Want a diagram, help you clear things up? He walks, unless you’ve got more to hold him on than you’re saying, and no, everybody knowing the way he is don’t count.”

“What the hell’s wrong with you, anyway?” the deputy said. But it was all retrograde sullenness now, since it was clear Raylan had won whatever game they were playing.

Fifteen minutes later, Raylan was walking Boyd out to the car, Boyd braced against his arm.

“You shoot anyone?”

“Didn’t come to gunplay.”

Boyd lolled back against the headrest, his hair flattening down, and Raylan didn’t know if he was drunk still or if the bruises on his face had seeped beneath his skin and addled his brain, but he had an almost sleepy easiness now that he was sure—and how the hell did he just think it, anyway?—that he was safe. “You shot the fake one for me and Ava, before, I thought you might take an interest, even if he was attributable to all righteous powers, et cetera.”

“You’re tripping over your own tongue. I thought before they’d gone at you too hard for you to want to talk.”

“That your way of saying I should shut up?”

“No,” Raylan said, because if it came to it, he found he’d rather have Boyd talking than silent, at least for the knowledge that he hadn’t slipped into unconsciousness, which would be one more damn problem to deal with on a night when he’d already had too many. “It’s my way of saying that you and happy mediums haven’t ever been exactly acquainted. You still at A—you still at the same house? Johnny said you were looking at suburbs, white picket fences, grills in the backyard. It seemed to upset him. You kill him or he just run off?”

“Ran off,” Boyd said. “Would you have told me he was against me?”

“Wasn’t planning on it, though I’ll admit I had other things on my mind at the time. And I’ll admit I wasn’t in the way of being favorably disposed towards you, hearing about Ava.”

Thinking of her took away some of the righteousness he’d felt, storming the castle—as it were—for Boyd’s sake, since what had happened to her was down to Boyd, in the end.

He had to wonder, though, if it all came back to Boyd, how it was the damn near everyone he’d ever shared a bed with had wronged the law somehow. Though maybe that came back to Boyd, too: a person did establish their preferences early.

Boyd was looking down at his hands. “Could you do anything for her, Raylan?”

“She’s not Marshal jurisdiction. You know that.”

“She could put herself in your hands,” Boyd said, and maybe that was why he was staring at his own, dirty fingernails and blood on the backs, knuckles not even bruised. Raylan had to admit he’d been a little self-destructive lately, unusual for a man who normally liked to blow up things other than himself. He could have thrown a punch back at the men going at him and Raylan still would have pulled him out of the cell and rolled him to the car, drunk off his ass or not, morose or not, for the sake of all the times Boyd had done the same for him, a long time ago.

But Boyd was still talking: “She could tell everything, Raylan. She knows it all, you know that, down to the last dime and where it went, what I used it for. What’s Delroy compared to all that?”

That was why he’d been drinking, then.

Raylan pulled the car off to the side of the road. It was late and Boyd’s face was mostly shadows, so he clicked on the dome light and then Boyd’s skin was pallid, sallow, beneath the bruises and the dried blood, and all he could think about was that he ought to jump at the chance to take Boyd’s offer, to let him persuade Ava—and Boyd could be persuasive, he had to admit it—to tell tales out of school to move her into some little town far away where Boyd would never find her while Boyd himself never saw free daylight again. Raylan had tried harder for less.

But he could smell Boyd’s blood and Boyd’s sweat.

“I do love her,” Boyd said, in response to everything Raylan wasn’t asking. “What you said about me—I’ve been constant, in one or two things.”

Raylan didn’t give a shit. He grabbed Boyd’s collar, pulled his neck against the seatbelt, and smashed their mouths together, like he hadn’t done since they were nineteen. He reopened the cut on Boyd’s lip and sucked at it until Boyd moaned, his hand tangled suddenly in Raylan’s hair. Raylan kissed him through the bruises and the twenty something years of silence and bad blood, until he couldn’t breathe anymore, until Boyd had taken all the air from him, and he was hard.

Boyd’s eyes, above the bruises, were so fucking beautiful. He said, “Let me—” and Raylan pushed him back into his seat again. The mark on his throat from the seatbelt was like a hickey.

“There you go,” Raylan said. “You love her so much. You’re so damn constant.”

“Raylan—”

“Boyd, do yourself a favor for once in your life, and just shut the hell up.”

He couldn’t for the life of him think of what he was doing, unbuttoning his pants the way he was, but his head wasn’t what he would have called clear.

He wanted to blot Boyd out, but that had been a hard enough task twenty years ago and it hadn’t gotten easier with time, so before he came, he looked over at Boyd’s soft un-bruised hands. They pissed him off more than they turned him on, implying smugly the way they did that Boyd was innocent, when he knew Boyd was anything but, so he grabbed Boyd’s hand, hard, and hauled it up to his mouth. He bit at Boyd’s knuckles and that was when he came.

He breathed in and out of his mouth and then blinked as the light from the glove compartment threw pale gold across Boyd’s knees. Boyd had taken his hand back, but he was offering it again, a fast food napkin between his fingers. He pushed the door closed and the light clicked off, which was merciful.

Raylan wiped himself off and tossed the napkin out the window. Harlan roads had seen worse than that.

“You get in lockup again, don’t think I’m going to make another drive to come rescue you,” he said.

“All right, Raylan,” Boyd said quietly. “I understand.”

“Get another napkin.” He couldn’t hear anything in his voice at all. “Your mouth’s bleeding again.”

When the light came on, this time Raylan kept his eyes away, and saw nothing, and after Boyd rolled his window down and back up, he started the car and drove away. He tried not to think much about what they were leaving behind, and what he couldn’t.


End file.
